


Ding-Dong, Bell

by yarn_and_loopholes



Category: Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare, The Tempest - Shakespeare
Genre: (of The Tempest), Ariel deserved better, Ariel uses e/em/eirs because e deserves punny pronouns, Background Titania/Oberon, Gen, None of these supernatural creatures have a human understanding of gender, Post-Canon, Temporary speech loss, There is no character death but a character is engulfed in a tree, and Prospero deserved worse, anxiety attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27782452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yarn_and_loopholes/pseuds/yarn_and_loopholes
Summary: Ariel is released from Prospero's hold. It is not an easy thing to recover from. Fortunately, Ariel has friends in an Athenian forest who are very ready to support and defend em.
Relationships: Oberon & Titania (Midsummer Night's Dream) & Ariel (The Tempest)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Ding-Dong, Bell

**Author's Note:**

> The title for this fic comes from the song Ariel sings in I.ii, part of which goes,
> 
> "Nothing of him that doth fade  
> But doth suffer a sea-change  
> Into something rich and strange.  
> Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell  
> Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell."
> 
> (text and punctuation taken from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/tempest.1.2.html)
> 
> Thanks to lucky-clover-cannot-hear-you for helping with tags and having an excellent name.

When Ariel feels the chains fall away from eir being, the tethers and the ties dissolve into nothing, and eir full-fledged freedom return to em as the tide rushes back to the shore, the only thing e can do is leap up and fall into the highest regions of the sky; unfettered, free.

It is a long, long time, before e has anything approaching thought, letting the wind flow through em and shift the making of eir being, eir only knowledge the sheer sensation of the sky. It is intoxicating, and exhilarating, and it is everything e has forgotten e needed these last twenty-three years, because e had been so weighed down as to forget how it felt. 

It is a long journey by sea to Milan, though Ariel had helped to speed it such. E can see where the fleet lies now, because e has drifted over it, and e can feel the familiar sickly golden coil of Prospero’s magic many leagues below em on the deck. E distorts in the air a second: e had not meant to follow back to that cloying glow. With a surge and a gale, Ariel rips emself away from the ship (so far below em), and speeds like an angry falcon on a course perpendicular to that of the vessel.

Ariel is not used to feeling angry. Eir relationship with emotion has never been so simple or straightforward as the damned old wizard seemed to think: it had taken Ariel decades to learn how to parse out eir experiences in a way that would be understandable to a human (particularly such a human as Prospero, who seemed simultaneously to think Ariel was incapable of feeling and that Ariel was irritatingly ineffectual at parsing eir experience into a relatable format. Prospero had stopped asking, and Ariel had stopped telling).

It takes Ariel a little while longer to realize, then, that what e is feeling is best described in human terms as _rage._ E wants to rend the skies, and emself with them; e wants to call down lightning and strike at Prospero’s heart for imprisoning em, and e also wants to turn sheer as a first doubt and never be seen by human eyes again. As Ariel realizes this, eir stride and span grow wider, stretching em into a whine in the air, an impossibly fast shimmer of deadly heat, a tropospheric comet. E sees trees far below em, and e hones emself, ready to strike. Lightning crackles across eir awareness, ready to be directed, ready to cleave a pine below em, and e cracks emself into the component molecules of the air and resounds over the forest, which—

(And here is the thing about the forest: the trees do not cower at Ariel’s thunderclap, nor even sway. This is not a wood that has aught to fear from storms.)

—Ariel deflects at the end of eir bolt, curling emself into a bright, bright ball, and falling headlong out of the air. 

The thunderclap is unusual, because there was a storm only eight days ago, and they had not had omen of another in the woods so soon. What is more, Oberon Monarch Occlusal thinks that he might recognize that...timbre. He takes one step in the direction of the thunder, and a ball of light falls out of the sky.

Oberon is a spirit of the dark and the woods, and so, though he does not know that mariners call this Saint Elmo’s Fire, he does know that it will do no harm to his trees. And what he does know, more than that, is the tinge of a signature that dances in the flames. He knows this spirit.

“Ariel?” he asks (with a human voice, because earlier he’d been leading some hunters astray). The answer that he gets in return is less a word and more of a shriek along the fae wavelengths, and Oberon feels every sprite within ten miles strive very hard to be elsewhere. Oberon starts, shivering out of his human form and melting into the shadows that are as true a shape as he, a shapeshifter, has. He inquires again of the spirit known as Ariel, calling em by the name e uses with other fae, then, receiving no response, by the name by which e has no choice but to answer.

The Fire shakes and quivers, but does not resolve itself. Ariel is flickering and restless, lucid and frenzied. Oberon knows by eir movement that it is taking all eir comportment to stay in one place. As is, e flickers between planes and realities and vague forms.

 _Why?_ is Oberon’s question, though he does not use language, because Ariel is pure spirit right now and could never find words like this anyway. Ariel can’t answer Oberon back as he asked, but Oberon feels flashes. Fear. Pain. Restraint. Restraint. Bonds that tightened until you forgot who you were. The subtle shifting of one’s thought patterns to the abhorred, to make one’s situation more tolerable. Restraint. Freedom. 

_What need?_ Oberon asks, even as the concepts make him shudder in his penumbra. Ariel shows him a wide space, but one where e can focus on other things beside emself and the vast. Oberon shifts his cloak around em, careful not to touch em in any dimension, and blinks, and they are at the deepest pool. Ariel sinks below the water and burns bright again in the well, and does not come up for a long time. Oberon makes himself a rock and watches.

Titania, Monarch of the Brake and Suzerain of Fleeting Light, floats down coolly beside her partner, at the edge of the deepest pool in their woods. Her partner is currently a rock, generically metamorphic and at least somewhat buried in the earth, with his eyes trained on the pool. She knows the shriek she heard could not have been imminent danger, for Oberon is calm, though she can feel him buzzing uneasily inside the form he has chosen. She leans to kiss his stony crown. “So, my dear, what is it that screamed so?” She enjoys the lilting of her voice on the air, folding her lepidopterous wings lazily behind her. 

_It is Ariel._

_Oh._ Not breaking from her stance by her partner, Titania stretches herself gently over the surface of the lake, and sounds it. It is Ariel, indeed. Titania, well-attuned to being a monarch of the wood, knows in the shivers in the air that Ariel is distressed.

Oberon lays a hand on her more physical form. _E’s not in a state to talk right now. Let em alone until e comes out on eir own._

Titania says nothing, but withdraws. She waits, and he waits, and she is concerned and simmering. She takes a form like an iridescent butterfly, rounding the pool with her ash spear in hand and making sure none approach. (Not that they would. This is Titania’s and Oberon’s forest, and their combined presences are sending off waves of forbiddance that keep all their subjects skirting around.) Oberon remains stone and waits, letting his uneasiness seep cold into the ground, and trying very hard not to let it wear on his mind.

It is some hours before Ariel comes out of the pool. E looks something like a storm petrel, though less solid of form. E is made of water, in places, under the feathers, and Oberon thinks he spies a hint of fire in eir tail. The weather spirit slips out from under the water as from under a blanket, making little sound. E stares at Oberon, and the woodland laird gradually allows the stone to melt away from him. At the edge of the clearing, Titania stills her guard and stretches herself into something longer and less corporeal. There is a long silence.

 _How now, Ariel?_ Titania asks, almost a whisper by the terms of inaudible communication.

 _Titania._ Ariel makes a gesture with eir head. _Oberon._

_Ariel._ Oberon is cautious. _Not with sound?_

 _Not now,_ Ariel conveys, and Titania detects a shudder in eir wing. _Maybe later. Can’t, right now._

Titania raises the antennae she does not have, meaning, _may I approach?_ The wind current that surrounds Ariel without touching an atom of the air softens and beckons her near. She drifts in. _Where were you, Ariel? It’s been dozens of years._

Ariel tells them. Ariel tells them using no words and many images but mostly memories and the essence of event. E tells them of eir meeting of the witch Sycorax; her torture and eir imprisonment; eir rescue by a sorcerer, one whose aid was contingent upon Ariel’s servitude. Ariel tells of eir bonds, the ones that ate away at eir connection to the winds and the wilds and the sky, until e forgot the full meaning of eir liberty. E tells of Prospero’s grand ambitions, his years-long revenge, and finally his emancipation of Ariel.

When Ariel is done, there is a long and pervasive silence.

“This is the end,” Ariel says, aloud, eir voice dusty and weak. The two rulers wait. 

Oberon presents Ariel with a small query of his consciousness. _Speech?_

“Yes, I think it’s better now. The resonance is...grounding.”

Titania’s form is still, but her great ethereal wings beat so quickly that, though they do not exist in this dimension, they cause the dust to dance anxious on the forest floor.

“And does this...dastard...live?” Oberon asks aloud, and his voice is the sound of roots turning in the earth. 

“Yes.”

_Where?_

Ariel shows them, in eir mind, the place e saw the ships, and the path e set them on, when e could still feel Prospero’s will at the heart of eir movements. After a moment, e recalls the uncounted time e spent in the bottom of the pool, and reaches out for the billows of the sea. _There. They are there._

 _Over sea, then,_ chimes Titania, violet with an undertone of bloody burgundy.

 _Yes._ Ariel affirms. _My purview._

This situation is wrong. Ariel should never have been caged. The sorcerer should not have escaped. He tried to tame the wind. This cannot end well for him. _Our power does not hold so much sway outside the forest_ , says Oberon, edging around the concept that he means. He feels a wave of understanding from Ariel.

“I can take you to his bark.” The airy spirit shakes eir head, eir feathers ruffling in eir own breeze.

“A bark?” says Oberon, and he smiles. “Indeed.”

Ariel does not fly them, because they are both capable of their own wings, but e does provide the currents. Where Titania glides and Oberon wheels, translucent scales and sleek feathers, Ariel is the induction of the currents. They coast through the sky (clouds closing slowly behind them, gathering on their tails as if curious to see) and they follow the ships faster than any falcon, so that it is no surprise for them to find King Alonso’s fleet still en route to Naples. Oberon and Titania still themselves.

 _Where is the hubrist?_ the king of shadows asks.

Ariel, shrunk again from proximity to Prospero, gestures and sighs. The pennant of the ship snaps. It is enough of a sign for the forest monarchs.

Ariel has felt the force of their fury; e knows they have come this way for love of em, and e is glad, but e does not know what they can do out here. Ariel does not know if e is able to harm Prospero, whether that one forbiddance has dissolved with eir contract. Before e starts to spiral, though, and circle in on emself and twist into only terror, Oberon lays a shadow that is not a hand on an air current that is not Ariel’s shoulder. Ariel shifts eir attention to him, asking. _What would you do?_

“It is a bark, yes?” Oberon whispers, and the whipping winds do not drown him out.

_Yes?_

“Well.” Says Titania, amber and strong. “We have a way with trees.”

The ship was hewn from several trees, and those years ago. Sometimes, repairs had been made with different kinds of wood. The ship is a palimpsest in places. On its scuffed and well-washed poop deck, an old man who no longer has a staff or a book is taking a walk.

His footsteps are heavy, and they echo in the wood. This upsets the wood, though it does not know why, because it has been a long time since the wood has been moved for any reason. It does not like this man, and it is getting restless. It stretches, and, strangely, it feels an odd growth. New roots. New branches. Leaves, even. A rush of power, and it stretches upwards, greedy for the sun, subsuming and consuming and drinking in the light until it is satiated. 

At its center, the new tree feels something hot and strange.

“Is he dead?” asks Ariel.

“No, of course not,” Oberon answers em. “It is always more fun not to kill them.”

“Besides,” Titania adds, “trees are very efficient. I daresay he has everything he needs to be kept alive for another twenty years.”


End file.
